Prometheus Viral

"I think we can assume that this happens in the film. There’s being up the creek without a paddle, and then there’s being without a boat. And then there’s being up the creek without a boat with aliens in the water." Image Source: Bleeding Cool.

More Prometheus viral videos have been released to promote the Ridley Scott film, which is opening in the first week of June. One in particular, Viral #4, shows lead actress Noomi Rapace in her role as archaeologist Elizabeth Shaw contacting Peter Weyland, founder of Weyland Corp., which becomes known as 'The Company' in the Alien film franchise. I have posted the virals and a slowed trailer, below the jump. More than hinting at the film's content, Viral #4 shows that Scott is cleverly using marketing for this movie to make a statement about the endgame of our current technology.

The marketing for this movie is masterfully nailing the Millennial Zeitgeist, balancing between the deep past and the far future. The film looks backwards to milk 2012's apocalyptic applications of ancient mythologies. Yet it also looks fowards. True to the myth which inspires the name of the film's titular spaceship, Scott does not promise a bright shiny Singularity, but rather a complex, conflicted and threatening future. He recognizes that the impact of social networking and integrated personal data mining are glossed with happy-clappy chummy messages, but are and will become ever more inherently creepy.

In Viral #4, Facebook's sinister server farms of today give way to a sci-fi future where every human gesture is analyzed through facial recognition systems, behavioural analytical apps, and personal databases that are public property. For this short piece, Scott uses subliminal imaging techniques and horror movie camera tricks alongside adaptations of today's real world facial recognition graphics to create an aura of intimate, ugly menace. The director is hinting that integrated personalized tech will give birth to a nightmare, a society gone astray, which may or may not explain why Scott's Ur-creatures in the film evidently decide to turn on a created humanity with their species-destroyers, the aliens.

Scott's Viral #3, a slimy-friendly Weyland Corp. faux advertisement for the android David 8.0, played by Michael Fassbender, is an equally unsettling play on transhumanism. Scott's Post-Postmodern statement is: when we finally cross the Uncanny Valley, and robots become indistinguishable from humans in spite of androids' lack of emotions, we will become alien to ourselves.

Viral #4: watch for the percentage of the Duchenne Smile; Scott also inverts the actress's head in a single frame around 1:13-1:15. AroundVideo Source: 20th Century Fox via Youtube.

Viral #3: Happy Birthday David: "I can do almost anything that could possibly be asked of me." Video Source: 20th Century Fox via Youtube.

Fan-slowed trailer for Youtubers who are scouring the trailer for more details about the film. Video Source: 20th Century Fox via Youtube.